What We Confuse With Codependency Love

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Hunger for love

When we are physically hungry, we can often pounce on food as soon as we get the chance. Teases the scent, teases the sight of the food. Quality is not that much concerned. The main thing is to eat as soon as possible. And it's difficult to tear yourself away from food. I want more and more.

If a feeling of loneliness and emptiness lives inside, then this creates a constant hunger for love. And then every date with a new person is like a cutlet with mashed potatoes for the hungry. The person seems ideal, you want to quickly plunge into a relationship with him and not let him go. There is no time to think about compatibility - to “eat” first.

Symptoms:

1. Diving quickly into a relationship without getting to know each other well.
2. The partner seems perfect. If someone tries to “open their eyes” and say “you are not a couple”, then this causes anger - you want to growl, as if a piece of meat was taken away from the dog.
3. I want to spend as much time as possible together, to do everything together, to share everything, everything, to have no secrets in anything.
4. I would like to be similar in everything, the same.
5. The thought of parting is terrifying. The phrases “You are everything to me”, “I can’t live without you”, “My whole life is in you” appear, which are characteristic of the state of dependence.

Something similar can happen during falling in love, but the acuteness of falling in love gradually disappears and "hunger" is satisfied. But if hunger is an internal state, then it is never satisfied.

Hope for love

When there is a strong hunger for love and at the same time there is an internal prohibition on relationships (fear of intimacy, a deep feeling of rejection, etc.), then we can find ourselves in an illusory relationship.

Symptoms:

1. It seems that we are satisfying our needs in a relationship, but in fact we are not. It sounds absurd, but it happens.
2. The prospective partner explicitly or indirectly indicates that he is not ready for a relationship with us. But we continue to seek him and believe that someday we will be able to win his love.
3. We are in a relationship, but the partner clearly indicates that he is less interested. And we do our best to make him finally love us, pay enough attention, etc.
4. We perceive as love not some specific pleasant actions of a partner in relation to us, but the very fact of this person's existence, his “hello, how are you” once a month. What is more important for us is not what actually happens in the relationship, but whether the beloved has even a drop of interest in us. Soil for fortune-tellers' earnings to the question “loves-dislikes”.

Once I met a man on a dating site. We've been texting for several weeks now, but he didn't want to meet in reality. However, he said that his intentions towards me were serious. I believed. It was his “intentions” that were important for him, not his real actions.

At some point, I finally realized that there would be no meeting. But I didn’t want to end this communication, because I didn’t want to get involved in a new relationship, but here, as it seemed to me, there was an opportunity to chat in the evening, share how the day went. And then I suddenly realized that this is an illusion - there is no such possibility, no one really asks me or listens when I tell my story.

Hunger for comfort

In this case, the value is not the person himself, but what he can give, the comfort that he gives. As a toy for a child, as a kind of service personnel, as an orthopedic mattress and a coffee machine.

Comfort may come from emotional presence, but this is a selfish thirst, a desire only to receive, but not to give. For example, one complains all the time, while the other consoles, but cannot get support himself.

A person is ready to invest something in a relationship, but rather mechanistic. “I need you not to break, so let's go to the theater if you want, and then you will give me a blowjob,” one of my boyfriends once said.

If we have such feelings for a person, then his absence brings real pain. But the pain is precisely due to the fact that we will deprive something pleasant. The man himself is of little concern to us.

“Sorry, I could not answer you, I had a high temperature,” I say, and in response there is more resentment for the fact that I did not answer (did not satisfy the need), and not worries and concerns about my health. Typical manifestation of such “love”.

Couples often converge when one has “hope for love” and the other has “hunger for comfort”. Then the first becomes a servant for the second.

Famine for recognition

We may need someone to admire us. We may need someone to admire.

We can want, expect, demand that a partner gets better (in work, in appearance, in whatever). We ourselves can strive to jump over our heads in order to become a worthy partner.

In such a relationship, games are played with shame and admiration, charm and disappointment.

In such a relationship, it is difficult to be simple, ordinary. You only need to be the best to deserve at least a drop of warmth, and that's not a fact.

Violence

This is similar to the Stockholm Syndrome, when we “love” a person who humiliates us, offends, destroys our self-esteem, uses physical violence. Yes, even if just passive aggression in the form of constant sarcasm and jokes.

This is not love. In this case, it makes sense to contact a specialist.

A fragment from my book " What do we confuse love with, or is Love".

The book is available on Liters and MyBook, as well as a collection " Codependency in its own juice".